by Erin Embly
Noah’s fingers slipped away from mine, panic setting in his eyes as he fell away from me.
I tried to dive down for him but ended up spinning in a tight circle instead. Turns out diving in the air is not the same as diving in water.
Taking a breath, I corrected myself, telling my wings to fold so I could lean forward more effectively. It must have worked, because I found myself hurtling towards the ground.
Carina was still flapping her wings, a futile effort to stay in the air, but it meant she was falling slower than I was.
I would need to time this perfectly if I didn’t want to crash into her and do more damage than necessary to all three of us at once.
I tensed the muscles in my back as I locked my eyes on Noah, feeling for my wings and readying them to open. My arms reached out again, this time aiming to grab him under the shoulders like I did every night before I dropped him into bed. It was what Becca had always done, even though he was already far too big for it.
He seemed to understand and relaxed as I neared him to hook my arms under his. My wings opened as soon as I had him, and I hugged him close while I watched Carina fall away from us and hit the ground with a thundering crash.
I struggled to lower myself to the ground slowly, Noah’s weight making it more difficult than ever to control the wings. And when I finally set his feet down on the platform, which was now mostly empty, he ran over to Carina and knelt beside her.
She was motionless as he moved his hand over the scales on her neck. I breathed a sigh of relief that she was still in her dragon form, which meant she was still alive.
But when I got closer, I could see her claws beginning to twitch and the tip of her tail beginning to slither across the ground.
“Noah,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “She’s going to start hurting people again unless we stop her. Can you do what you did at the police station yesterday? Make her feel calm?”
He looked up at me. “But you said I shouldn’t do that unless she tells me it’s okay.”
“I know, but this is a special case. She’s not herself right now.” I racked my brain, trying to think of a way to explain things quickly without telling him to just do it because I said so. “There’s a monster controlling her,” I said as her wings went taut and her eyes opened, just as wild as before, “and monsters don’t get a say in how we stop them.”
He thought for a moment, eyes shifting away from me, before he nodded and turned back to Carina.
Steam snorted out from her nostrils, and I tensed as Noah lifted his hand to put it on her snout. Would she incinerate him before he could gain influence over her emotions? Would his magic even work on her now that the chaneques still had their bony fingers clutched around her soul?
She opened her mouth as his fingers touched her, but instead of a burst of fire, her tongue slipped out lazily and hung over her bottom jaw. Then she began to shrink.
Her scales turned over into burnt flesh, and I whipped off my jacket as soon as I saw her clothes were gone. Shredded to pieces by her shifting and then incinerated by the flames. The heavy leather I threw over her would hurt against her burns, but it was better than letting an eight-year-old lie naked in the middle of a Metro platform. Even if most of the bystanders had run away, some were beginning to filter back in now that the dragon was down. They were even giving me strange looks, not at all the kind I would expect as the one who’d just saved their lives, but that was probably because I was standing there in only jeans and a bra, with a torn-up bloodstained shirt wrapped around my middle.
At least they were keeping their distance.
All but a few. Ray caught my eye as he sprinted down the escalator, a small woman following him and Dirk close behind.
Carina sat up at this point, wrapping my jacket around her torso lazily as she stared straight ahead with blank eyes. She didn’t turn to look at Ray when he knelt down beside her, didn’t move when he grasped her head in his hands and planted a hard kiss in her hair with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.
“Is she . . .” he asked when he’d opened them.
“She’s okay for now, thanks to Noah. But I don’t know how long he can keep this up.” I glanced at Noah, who seemed completely fine, and although that was good in the moment it struck me as something I’d need to worry about later. If there were limits to his abilities, I hadn’t run into them yet.
Ray breathed in sharply, then slipped a bag off his shoulder and unzipped it on the ground. An obsidian blade, white feathers, what looked like dried snake skins, and a lighter were unpacked slowly and carefully. He laid them on the ground in a semicircle around Carina, then took off his own coat and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, pulling it over my shoulders.
But he wasn’t done. He took off his shirt next, and I narrowed my eyes as he sat in front of Carina and lay down with his bare back against the cold floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“This is the ritual,” Ray said.
The woman who had come in with him knelt behind Carina and grasped the little girl’s hands. She moved Carina like a puppet, reaching her right arm forward and curling her fingers around the obsidian blade that had been set before her.
I didn’t like the look of that.
I liked it even less when Carina’s arms were raised over her head, the tip of the knife pointed down. The woman took in a short breath, shut her eyes, and plunged Carina’s hands towards Ray’s bare chest.
I jerked into motion, gritting my teeth as I darted forward to catch their wrists before the blade could slice into my brother.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I yelled.
The knife dropped out of Carina’s fingers, only missing Ray because he sat up halfway to glare at me. “This is the ritual,” he repeated, his words sharper now. “If you don’t let her kill me, she’ll be lost forever.”
19
I snatched the obsidian blade from the floor where it had fallen between Ray and his daughter.
“Fuck no,” I said. Ray might well be right about what needed to be done, but I wasn’t going to just sit here and watch my niece be forced to kill her own father unless I was sure there was no other way. “Explain.”
Ray sighed and stared at me with cold eyes. “She needs to make a sacrifice.”
I went silent for a moment, trying to process the implication. “Couldn’t you have brought a goat?”
He shook his head, smiling at me softly. “No, hermana. Not for this.”
I cringed, eyes darting to the woman grasping Carina’s hands. “And who’s she?”
“Vera,” she said flatly, looking at me. “Nice to meet you.”
I pursed my lips, not convinced at all that she thought it was nice.
“Carina’s mother,” Ray offered.
“The one who won’t take care of her own daughter?” I asked before I could stop myself, but I didn’t regret it when I saw the daggers in Vera’s glare.
“I’m taking care of her now,” she said, nodding at her daughter’s limp arms within her grasp.
“By making her kill her father—the one who actually feeds her and takes her to school and talks to her about her life and . . .” I stopped, feeling myself rambling in anger.
“This will be good for her,” Vera said. “She is a dragon, and solitude is our nature. She needs to learn to do all those things for herself.”
I swallowed, recognizing a dead end when I saw one. This woman was fully stuck in her ways, and I didn’t think I would ever understand her perspective well enough to convince her otherwise.
“Why not you, then?” I asked, changing tack.
She gave me a questioning glare.
“Why aren’t you the one being sacrificed? If you truly live a solitary life, no one will miss you.” Deep down, I knew that wasn’t a good enough reason to ask someone to die—but I also knew I didn’t want Ray to be the one lying there on the ground.
“I am actually useful to our god,” V
era said. “Unlike him.” Her eyes traveled to Ray, and I followed them with mine.
He gave me a hopeless look that told me he thought she was right. It was what he’d explained to me yesterday. Without me at his side, he was powerless. And so if I didn’t accept the god’s power, he would have no place as a witch.
Except I just had accepted the god’s power.
“That’s not true,” I said, moving over to him. “Not anymore.”
I reached out and touched his bare shoulder with my palm, closing my eyes and opening my scrye to share with him the power of his god—our god, I thought with a frown—that the bunny had opened to me.
He jerked up, twisting around to look at me. “You . . .”
“I had to,” I whispered. “To save her. I needed to fly.”
His eyes glistened, and I hoped he wouldn’t cry. I hadn’t done it for the reasons he’d wanted me to, and now that the adrenaline of battle had worn off, the reminder that I’d done it at all was making me feel sick.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
“What now?” I turned back to Vera. “Which one of you is less useful now that he has me at his side?”
“This is ridiculous.” She glared at Ray, then said something to him in Spanish that I didn’t understand.
I frowned, wishing I’d been a better student when I’d taken Spanish classes as a young child. I could usually understand the basics, but Vera’s words were far too bitchy and fast and complicated for me to grasp.
Motion by the escalator caught my eye as I tuned them out, and I looked up to see Miriam and Adrian making their way down.
The anger that had my nerves on edge eased a bit when I saw him. There were bags under his eyes that probably rivaled my own, his nice coat was torn in a few places, and his hair was messy as all hell—but he was breathing and walking and conscious, projecting a sense of steady strength that made me feel like everything was going to be okay even as my brother readied himself to have his own daughter slice open his chest.
Adrian wasn’t looking at us, though. His head was turned towards the crowd of onlookers, which made me turn my head as well. It didn’t take me long to realize what had caught his attention.
Gary’s colorful scarf stood out in the sea of dull coats. When I spotted him, I expected him to run away, but instead he seemed to be marching over directly towards us.
He pulled a gun out from under his jacket, and Adrian and I moved at the same time to close in on him.
He only got one shot off before the knife in my hands was at his throat and his arms were pinned back by Adrian, the gun dropping to the ground.
Vera growled, a bullet wound blooming red in her upper arm, which was still wrapped around her daughter. Had Gary been aiming for Carina?
“You can’t do this,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I can,” I said, ripping off his scarf and pressing my blade into the soft scar on his neck. “And I think you know just how easy it will be.”
“No—I mean that.” He nodded at Carina. “If she takes back her soul, it will destroy everything I’ve built.”
“That sounds like exactly what we want,” I said.
“Where do you think the souls go?” Gary asked, and I stared at him blankly. “Into the land—into these walls.” His eyes shifted over to the lower portion of the textured domed ceiling. “If one of them gets loose, they’ll all escape.”
I remembered the dead faces and skeletal arms that had stretched out to me, always from the walls, and realized those might have been the stolen souls of all the chaneques’ previous victims.
“You say that like I should care,” I said.
Gary’s eyes widened. “I don’t know what will happen,” he whispered.
“We’ll find out together then.” I met Adrian’s eyes and hoped he would understand when I said, “You should go.”
Adrian tilted his head, giving me a questioning look.
“Get all these people out of here.” I jerked my head at the onlookers around us, tightening my grip on the knife at Gary’s throat. Come on, Mr. Law-Abiding Police Officer, get out of my sight so I can murder this guy. At the very least, Miriam would understand if Adrian didn’t.
But his shoulders dropped as I glared at him, his mouth opening halfway before shutting again, and I knew he understood.
He cleared his throat. “Be careful.”
With a nod, I wrapped my free arm around Gary to take control of him from Adrian, pressing the knife a little harder into the scar at his neck.
Adrian pulled away from us and began corralling the onlookers with Miriam, waving them away as they would do for any crime scene.
I pushed Gary forward, walking us over to where Ray was still sitting on the ground.
“I have your sacrifice,” I said as I approached. “Put your damn shirt back on.”
He almost smiled at me, which would have been an amazing feat considering the state of his daughter. Instead, he pulled his shirt on and came around behind Gary.
“I can take over from here,” he said, and I relinquished my hold on the vampire, switching out one of my own knives for the obsidian blade at his throat. Gary let out a sharp yelp as Ray twisted his arm.
Dirk came over to me with a sly grin on his face. “That a bloodsucker there?” he asked, holding up his flamethrower. “If he needs torching . . .”
I almost felt sorry to have to deny him the pleasure. But if anyone was going to be torching a vampire tonight, it would be me with Simeon’s headless body.
Ray shook his head. “No, but can you rip off his shirt while we hold him?”
Dirk shrugged and did as he was asked, although I thought I heard him grumble something about weird kinks in the process.
“Let’s get him down,” Ray said.
I did my best to help him move Gary to the ground without pulling the knife away from his throat.
Gary was whimpering now, struggling against Ray, and my blade sliced a shallow cut into his scar accidentally. Blood dripped slowly from the wound, and Gary squeezed his eyes shut as he froze to avoid hurting himself further.
There was no way out for him now.
Noah had started to sway from side to side in boredom, and Vera was way beyond antsy. She lifted Carina’s arms again and swiftly sliced down into Gary’s chest with the obsidian blade.
Gary let out a long whine, his teeth grinding together and his lips pinched in. Blood welled up from the cut, and Vera loosened Carina’s hold on the knife until it fell to the ground.
Then she carefully directed her daughter’s fingers to peel open the layers of flesh and muscle on Gary’s chest, revealing the white edges of ribcage poking out of the gore. She curled their fingers around the ribs, breaking them apart two at a time as Gary jerked and grunted beneath us.
I had the fleeting thought that I hoped Carina’s fingers wouldn’t be crushed under her mother’s strength, but I knew Carina was stronger than a human girl even when she was in her human form.
When it was done, Gary’s heart lay bare, beating, vulnerable inside his broken chest. Vera and Carina picked up the obsidian knife again, cutting carefully into the connective tissue around the organ before scooping it out with their bare hands.
Together, they held it over Carina’s head and squeezed, the blood flowing out into the girl’s hair and down her neck.
Gary went stiff under my grip, and I let go of him, motioning for Ray to do the same. Even though he wasn’t technically dead, he wouldn’t be able to move with his heart no longer pumping blood through his veins.
Carina absently blinked as they set the squashed heart down in front of her.
With bloody hands, they picked up the feathers and snake skins and layered them into Gary’s ruined chest cavity.
I narrowed my eyes, at this point wondering just how much was involved in this horrific ritual. I would have thought the whole bit about taking a shower under a beating heart would have done it, but . . .
Ray smiled at me as Vera pus
hed Carina’s thumb into the lighter, sparking up a flame. “We must set a fire in the chest,” he said, “for the light will guide her soul back to her.”
“Mmm hmm,” I mumbled, hoping I’d never again come across a monster so nasty that this was considered the cure for it.
Vera guided Carina in lighting aflame a single feather, then dropped it into the pile of tinder in Gary’s chest.
“Feathers and serpents, a link to the god who created her ancestors,” Ray whispered to me, “whose mark will always be on her soul no matter which god she serves.”
The feathers curled quickly in the heat, almost melting as the flames licked over the snake skins. The fire grew higher, and soft laughter shook the walls around us.
I twisted my head, putting my hand on Noah’s shoulder as duplicates of him appeared in every direction, each one grinning at me with yellowed teeth and shriveled cheeks.
With the real Noah close enough to touch, these fakes weren’t nearly as frightening. But the dead faces emerging from the walls were frightening enough to make up for it.
There were so many of them—maybe even hundreds—despite the fact that there was no way the chaneques had taken so many victims already. Unless their victims carried over with them from place to place, or . . .
My insides went cold as the alternative dawned on me. Maybe they took the souls not only of their victims but of their victims’ victims. Everyone the cat lady had killed on the train, everyone the fae had killed in the bar, everyone the gorilla shifter had killed in the mall . . .
Where would they all go, now that they were free?
The air whistled as the skeletal specters flew overhead, stretching out as I’d seen them do before and then slowly turning into mist.
By the time Carina’s made it over to her, it was far from horrifying. It looked just like any regular soul, hardly visible at all but for a slight sheen in the air.
It hovered before her for a moment as she looked up, slight apprehension in her otherwise empty eyes. Then it sucked itself back into her, causing her to go stiff for a second before she let out a long, piercing shriek.
Bats. Maybe I should have warned Ray about the pain.